X Windows Cursor Magnification

[Mark A. Nordman]

Is there a simple way to "magnify" (blowup, expand) the size of the X windows cursor ? A colleague with vision problems frequently loses sight of the cursor on his desktop. We've tried "xsetroot -cursor_name " to change cursor shapes but it hasn't really helped because the cursor is still too small. Is there some attribute where we could simply specify a magnification (size) factor of 2X or 3X for the standard default cursor ?

[Elizabeth_2]

Hi Mark!

There is a site that has comments on howto enable enlarged
mouse cursors with the X window system:

http://www.caldera.com/LDP/HOWTO/mini/X-Big-Cursor.html

The motivation for this site was a visually impaired co-student
of the author who wanted to enlarge the mouse cursor under
X-Windows.

[Paul Anderson_1]

If you are running an Xserver patch
that is equivalent to or more recent
than July2000, a "contrib" option was
added to do this for you.

To enable this, you'll need to edit
the /etc/X11/X0screens file and add
the following before the "Screen"
directive.

ServerOptions
HpCursorScaleFactor 2

This will magnify the cursor by a factor
of 2X. You can specify values greater
than 2, as well. However, if the scaled cursor falls outside a 64x64 bounding box, the cursor will be rescaled to fit within
this 64x64 bounding box.

Once you've edited the X0screens file,
you'll need to restart your Xserver for
the changes to take effect. You can
either press [Ctrl][Shift][Break] to
do this, or perform a "kill ".

This option has worked on a number of
cursors, but I wouldn't consider it
to be fully "officially" supported at
this time.